Battle for Terra Review

Not Terra-ble, but not incredibly successful, either.

With regard to animated films, Pixar seems to have somehow struck the balance – the precarious middle-road between youthful entertainment and more carefully nuanced adult fare. Where some films pander to the cartoonish and silly, painting the screen with slapstick heroes and cuddly, bug-eyed companions, Pixar has mastered the art of adding just the right amount of substance or intelligence or, dare we say, darkness to the recipe to produce a film that works for all audiences, on all levels. And the reason we mention Pixar, the very center of this cinematic see-saw – a company with no relation whatsoever to Battle for Terra – is that too few animated films skew toward the opposite side of the balance, unafraid to eschew the humorous in favor of offering a mature story to younger viewers.

For better or for worse, Terra attempts this feat, and if, in the end, the attempt is the only real praise that one can lend to the film, it's certainly not faint praise.

The adventure begins on a distant planet inhabited by peace-loving creatures. They live above the clouds, at the tops of towering trees, floating from home to home; they hold festivals in celebration of life itself; they are gentle, they are kind – and they are this way because they know the dangers of war. Centuries prior, the race had all but annihilated itself and the experience taught the surviving generations a valuable lesson about the importance of peace. Suddenly, a ship appears in the sky – a human ship. Probes descend to gather up specimens, and it is here that one of the aliens, Mala (Evan Rachel Wood), is successful in disabling the ship of Jim Stanton (Luke Wilson). Nursing the human back to health, Stanton finds a quick affection for the creatures, and communicates to them the tragic story of Earth's fate. An environmental catastrophe forced the surviving humans to terraform nearby planets and, after centuries, these planets eventually went to war with each other to control their own destinies. In the melee, both planets were destroyed, billions of lives lost. These few are the last surviving humans, scowering the universe for a new homeworld, and in Terra, they seemed to have found it.

The human army is lead by General Hemmer (Brian Cox) and it's to the film's credit that while Terra tends to sympathize most heavily with the creatures, Hemmer's villainy is never simply black-or-white. For a bad-guy in an animated film, Hemmer's choice to try and colonize Terra, waging war against its citizens, is one of absolute necessity, demanding that conscience be put aside in favor of survival. And neither does the film simply anoint Stanton as the agreeable hero. He undergoes a significant moral struggle, as well, one that isn't concluded until the very last moments of the film. It's a surprising depth of character for a movie so heavily skewed toward younger audiences.

Nor does Terra shy away from violence. The firefights are aggressive. Characters die, killed by other characters. One player commits suicide in an act of heroism. The concept of genocide is subtly, but prevalently discussed. Each of these are common ingredients in live-action adventure films, but seldom in animated productions, and Terra does a relatively successful job at handling them in such a way as to present a far-from-fluffy version of the world without terrifying the children.

But the film's major, crippling flaw, is found in its pacing and presentation. For a 3-D film, the world feels incredibly flat. The level of detail in the animation simply isn't up to par with the more recent examples we've seen from other studios, and the pacing is such that we seem to float through the world at a leisurely clip regardless of the situation on screen. The first third of the movie is painfully slow to watch, and it's only well after the humans arrive and the actual conflict begins that the film picks up any significant momentum. The performances are fine overall though, like the film itself, are initially unengaged throughout the first half-hour. Comedian David Cross voices Stanton's repair-robot and while he's clearly supposed to be the comedic relief in a film that seems almost aggressively averse to comedy, his own performance is simply too underplayed to be amusing.

Make no mistake, the battle for Terra has been waging for quite some time. The film, which initially premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, is finally getting its wide release with a fully-polished 3-D version of the formerly 2-D film. And it feels a little like a project that's been floating around for awhile, releasing to relatively little fanfare and making a dispassionate curtain-call that matches the subdued tone of the film itself. One can almost tell that the 3-D process was applied after-the-fact, once the film had begun to garner some studio attention, if only because the film doesn't appear to have been filmed with 3-D in mind. That said, the 3-D is fine and offers some nice moments of depth and scale, especially in the concluding battle sequence.

Overall, Terra tries – and that means something – but it ultimately fails to get the balance right. It's probably a little too intense or mature for younger viewers – and while animation, as a medium, shouldn't be constrained to telling only children's tales, no doubt the film is being marketed to that audience. That said, it's certainly not a bad film, and if any of what you've read here sounds intriguing to your tastes, you wouldn't be disserved by taking a trip to the theater.